On
April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” speech [3] in which he denounced the
scourges of “poverty, racism, and militarism.” Exactly one year later, he was
assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, while organizing alongside black sanitation
workers and preparing to launch the Poor People’s Campaign.

Now,
50 years after Dr. King’s historic address, a new coalition called “The
Majority” is emerging to tackle the triple evils identified by Dr. King and
build a “multi-racial, cross-movement fight for justice, freedom and the right
to live fully, with dignity and respect,” according to a statement emailed to
AlterNet. This 50-organization-strong initiative includes the Black Lives
Matter Global Network, Mijente, Fight for $15, Indigenous Environmental Network
and many more organizations.

“The
goal of the coalition is to create space where we can come out of our silos as
people who do social and racial justice work,” said Chelsea Fuller, an
organizer with the Movement for Black Lives and a member of The Majority, in an
interview with AlterNet. “We want to come together to say that racism,
anti-blackness, capitalism and militarism affect all of our communities. They
are central to the issues that we are all fighting.”

Marisa
Franco, director of Mijente, emphasized in a press statement, “The shared
attacks our communities are facing mean that we have a shared fate and shared
work to do together. We cannot defend ourselves if we do it alone, and we
cannot build sanctuary for some of us without it being something that protects
all of us.”

Those
organizing with The Majority coalition seek to unite front-lines movements and
rally behind a vision rooted in historical perspective.

Organizers
say they draw inspiration from King’s 1967 speech, but ultimately credit the
broader social movement that he was part of. “While we use the date of Dr.
King’s historic speech and tragic assassination as a beginning point for our
2017 mobilization, we reject any analysis that would suggest that Dr. King was
singularly responsible for the movement,” said the Majority. “That’s why on
April 4th, we will also teach and learn about grassroots organizers who were
the backbone of the Black Freedom Movement, and other social justice movements
in the U.S. and globally.”

The
Majority’s new initiative, “Beyond the Moment: Uniting Movements from April 4th
to May Day,” is book-ended by another historical marker: International Workers’
Day.

“May
1st or May Day (International Worker’s Day) emerged out of the fight for an
eight-hour workday in 1886 in Chicago. On this day, striking workers clashed
with police, resulting in several deaths—four of the protesters were later
hanged,” writes The Majority. “In the context of a new president using
grandiose promises of job creation to mask the fundamentally anti-worker and
pro-corporation nature of his policies, it is imperative that we put forth a
true, collective vision of economic justice and worker justice, for all
people.”

“Between
April 4 and May Day, there will be a combination of mass political education and
direct actions that will take place across the country,” said Fuller. “Right
now, folks are still planning their actions, teach-ins, seminars, protests and
mass marches. The organizations taking part have membership and reach to groups
all over the country.”

Meanwhile,
momentum for a massive May Day strike appears to be growing. Earlier this
month, a network of more than 300,000 farmworkers, servers, cooks and
food-manufacturers, including a large local chain of the Service Employees
International Union, announced [10] that they will join the
walkout “to stop the relentless attacks of the Trump administration and its allies
in corporate America.” Immigrant justice organizations, including Movimiento
Cosecha, or Harvest Movement, have spent months organizing across the country
for Un Dia Sin Inmigrantes (A Day Without Immigrants) to win [11] the
“permanent protection, dignity, and respect of immigrants.”

“The
time has never been more urgent for grassroots communities to fight for our
lives and liberation together in a multi-racial and intergenerational
movement,” said Cindy Wiesner of It Takes Roots, one of the many organization
members of The Majority.

“We’re
joining together with the Movement for Black Lives because our two movements
have a common bond in fighting the racism that keeps down people of color
everywhere,” said Latierika Blair, 23, a worker at McDonald’s in Memphis,
earning $7.35 an hour. “McDonald's conspires with police to try to silence us
when we speak out for higher pay. Corporations and politicians act to keep
workers and black people from getting ahead in America. We should be investing
in our people and communities. That's why we have to protest, and that’s why we
will keep speaking out together until we win.”

Sarah
Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet. A former staff writer for Common
Dreams, she coedited the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn
Against War. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahlazare [12].

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs